Egypt to hold December referendum on new constitution
President Mohammed Morsi has called for Egypt's new draft
constitution to be put to a referendum on 15 December.
Saturday, December 1, 2012
BREAKING! (EGYPT)
RICE IS QUITE THE UNDERCOVER CRIMINAL!
Rice has investments in bank defrauded by Madoff, in Irish pharmaceuticals, in firm located in Bermuda
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Rice has assets between $23.5 million and $43.5 million. The nonpartisan group named her the wealthiest member of the executive branch in 2009.
As first reported by the Free Beacon, Rice’s portfolio includes investments of hundreds of thousands of dollars in several energy companies known for doing business with Iran.
A Washington Free Beacon analysis of her personal financial disclosure statement shows additional controversial foreign investments.
Among the foreign entities in which Rice holds assets is Banco Santander. Santander and its investors lost more than $3.2 billion as a result of Bernie Madoff’s fraudulent Ponzi scheme. It is believed that Santander was aware of the fraudulent nature of Madoff’s scheme and continued to increase its investments anyway. A federal judge ruled that Santander could not be sued under U.S. securities law because, while the suit was filed in the U.S., the fraudulent acts were more readily apparent in Europe.
Rice also has investments in Shire PLC, an Irish bio-pharmaceutical company. Shire was the third largest pharmaceutical company in the United Kingdom before it decided to bolt from the country for a tax break. The company in 2008 became a tax resident of Ireland in order to reduce its payment on $2.1 billion of largely international sales.
Another of Rice’s investments, Marvell Technology Group, is a semiconductor provider headquartered in tax haven Bermuda. The Obama campaign was quick to take aim at Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for holding assets in Bermuda-based companies. Rice made three purchases of Marvell between May 5, 2011 and September 15, 2011. On October 14 of that year, Rice sold up to $50,000 worth of Marvell stock. Rice’s current position in Marvell Technology is unclear.
Obama’s opening bid in negotiations proposes to eliminate the statutory requirement that CONGRESS approve increases in the federal government’s borrowing authority.
PHAROAH OBAMA IS UNINTERESTED IN RESOLVING THIS PROBEM IN AMERICA, BUT HE IS VERY INTERESTED IN HAVING COMPLTE POWER OVER IT!
Obama's opening bid is not that of a concerned President interested in reducing the deficit
GOP leaders roundly rejected the offer, which reportedly included $1.6 trillion in tax increases, $50 billion in new stimulus spending, and a major mortgage refinancing proposal (cost unspecified). The proposal would also eliminate the statutory requirement that Congress approve increases in the federal government’s borrowing authority.
The White House did not offer any concrete commitments on spending cuts or entitlement reform.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said he “burst into laughter” when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner outlined the proposal at a meeting with GOP leaders on Capitol Hill. He called the plan “almost comical.”
Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer called it an “insulting deal.”
“Robert E. Lee was offered easier terms at Appomattox,” he said on Fox News. “Not only are there no cuts in this [proposal], there’s an increase in spending with a new stimulus. I mean, this is almost unheard of.”
The White House proposal was adopted from the president’s most recent budget proposal, which did not receive a single Democratic vote in either chamber of Congress.
Independent analysts panned Obama’s budget for its reliance on phantom spending cuts and for failing to adequately address the burgeoning national debt.
On top of the $50 billion in stimulus spending, the White House also proposed tax and spending measures, such as an extension of unemployment insurance ($30 billion), that total more than $400 billion. The $1.2 trillion (over 10 years) in automatic spending cuts scheduled to take effect at the end of the year would be deferred for one more year.
House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) offered a pessimistic take on Friday and told reporters the president’s offer “wasn’t a serious one.”
“There’s a stalemate,” he said. “Let’s not kid ourselves. Right now we’re almost nowhere.”
Following his meeting with Geithner on Thursday, Boehner warned: “There is a real danger of going off the fiscal cliff.”
“Appalling,” one GOP aide said of the White House offer. “If I were Boehner, I’d be pretty pissed off. It’s definitely a wake up call.”
The Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel wrote that the president’s proposal is a telling example of why Obama deserves his reputation “as the modern president least able to forge a consensus.”
It is not the first time the president has demanded stimulus spending in budget negotiations. However, the $1.6 trillion in new taxes is roughly twice the amount discussed in previous talks with Congressional Republicans.
Though GOP leaders acknowledge that their political leverage is somewhat diminished following the president’s reelection, they are unwilling to agree to what one aide described as an “unconditional surrender” on taxes.
The two parties remain deadlocked over the fate of the Bush-era tax rates for high-income families and small businesses. Republicans have agreed to offer new revenue by capping or eliminating deductions for wealthy earners, but most are opposed to higher rates.
After initially hedging on the issue, Obama now insists “there can be no deal without rates on top earners going up,” in the words of White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.
The president has repeatedly called on House Republicans to pass a permanent extension of the Bush-era tax rates on incomes below $200,000 and has sought to redeploy his extension campaign operation to rally support for his position.
Speaking to crowd in Hatfield, Pa., on Friday, Obama accused Republicans of holding “middle-class tax cuts hostage.”
“If Congress does nothing, every family in America will see their income taxes automatically go up on January 1st,” he said. “That’s sort of like the lump of coal you get for Christmas. That’s a Scrooge Christmas.”
The House has already passed a bill extending all of the Bush rates but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) has made clear he does not intend to bring it up in the Senate.
Democrats are increasingly confident that House Republicans will cave.
Republicans are willing to offer more tax revenue as part of a deal if Democrats agree to meaningful changes to entitlement programs such as Medicare, which is the primary driver of the national debt.
Some GOP lawmakers such as Rep. Tom Cole (R., Okla.) have suggested that Republicans should simply give the president what he wants.
“I think we ought to take the 98 percent deal right now,” Cole said of extending the Bush-era tax rates except for those on high incomes. “It doesn’t mean I agree with raising the top two. I don’t.”
Cole and others have argued that Obama’s greatest leverage lies in his ability to blame Republicans for the tax increase every American will face if all the Bush rates are allowed to expire.
“If Rs are smart and take tax issue off the table, focus will shift to D refusal to cut spending,” former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer wrote on Twitter.
The editors of National Review argued, “It would be better to pass legislation extending the middle-class tax cuts and to allow the top rates to rise as scheduled” than to accept the latest offer from the White House.
A House leadership aide dismissed Cole’s proposal as “one guy’s idea” that members would not support.
However, aides do concede privately that for Democrats to be insisting on a permanent extension of nearly all of the Bush-era tax rates is a long-term victory for Republicans.
“Looks like Pres George W. Bush is a winner of fiscal cliff deal,” tweeted Brad Dayspring, former communications director for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. “AT LEAST 98% of one of his signature laws preserved by Dem President.”
Still, a number of influential conservatives are suggesting Republicans might be better off “going over the fiscal cliff,” and are challenging the conventional wisdom that Obama would claim the political high ground in such a scenario.
“He’s going to have a recession, nine percent unemployment, two million more unemployed, and a second term that’s going to be a ruin,” Krauthammer said. “That is not a good proposition if you are Barack Obama.”
Keith Hennessey, a former director of the National Economic Council under George W. Bush, wrote that Obama’s threats to veto extension of the rates on high earners is a bluff.
“President Obama’s veto threat decision is not just about fiscal policy, and it’s not just about who gets blamed for a legislative failure,” Hennessey wrote. “It’s about whether the President wants to cause a recession in 2013 and hamstring his second term. No matter what he or his advisors say, he cannot afford to take that risk.”
The president has just as much of an incentive to avoid the fiscal cliff as Republicans do, the House leadership aide told the Washington Free Beacon.
“The part that most people are missing here is that the president doesn’t want to have a destroyed economy on his hands in January,” the aide said. “He doesn’t want a second recession. He’s got Democrats like [Sen.] Patty Murray saying, ‘Let’s go over the cliff.’ He’s got to worry about keeping his own party in line.”
Sen. Patty Murray (D., Wash.) recently said that extending all of the current tax rates would be “a worse idea” than raising taxes on every income level.
Some Republicans fear they are playing into the president’s hands by continuing to negotiate a deal behind closed doors as opposed to in public via congressional committees, where Democrats would be forced to take positions on a host of taxation and spending issues.
“Secret negotiations are a terrible practice,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.). “I don’t know what the Democrats’ plan is. The American people deserve to know.”
Another GOP Senator, who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon on background, was even more blunt.
“The White House is playing Republicans like a fiddle,” he said.
This to me seems like this town is being st up for POSSIBLE CIVIL UNREST! What do you think?
Lock your doors and load your guns: San Bernardino warned of uncontrollable crime as police squad shrinks
City officials prepared a budget plan earlier this month that would attempt to tackle the $45.8 million deficit partially by cutting benefits for city workers like firefighters and police officers, as well as eliminating 80 cops from the force altogether.
“Let’s be honest, we don’t have enough police officers. We have too many criminals living in this city. We have had 45 murders this year… that’s far too high for a city of this size,” Penman said.
The cuts will leave the city with just over 200 sworn officers – a small number in a city of 213,012 that is plagued with crime. The city’s police department has also cut down on the number of people answering its emergency phone lines: problematic in a city that was ranked America’s sixteenth most dangerous in 2004. San Bernardino has also seen a 50 percent increase in murders this year compared to 2011, and this week’s council meeting was actually called in response to the brutal murder of a 76-year-old woman in a neighborhood that is usually quiet.
During the meeting, Police Chief Robert Handy also emphasized the need to reduce the city’s drug problems and theft. But in a region where prisons are already overcrowded and the streets are overwhelmed with gang violence, San Bernardino faces heavy obstacles.
“We are trying to refocus and pay a little more attention to those (types of crimes) because honestly, those are the ones we get complaints on,” Handy said, reports the local Sun newspaper. “We may not come out immediately, but many of those transients have been arrested more than 50 times. There’s no room for them in jail.”
With an inadequate police force, no room in prison, and no money to gather resources, Penman believes city residents must fend for themselves.
“People have asked me what should we do? Go home, lock your doors, and load your gun,” he told the crowd of nearly 150 people at the city council meeting.
San Bernardino filed for bankruptcy on Aug. 1 after acquiring more than $1 billion in debt. The city was the third in California to go bankrupt in just over a month.
In the mid-2000’s, San Bernardino took out $190 million in bonds and loans to finance city construction, but budget problems arose after the 2007 housing crisis. Before it declared bankruptcy, 75 percent of San Bernardino’s budget had gone to public safety agencies to tackle crime.
Penman has come under scrutiny for encouraging residents to stock up on firearms, but City Councilwoman Wendy McCommack further explained the statement to CBS News.
“We need to take our streets back, we need to take our neighborhoods back and we need to protect our homes, and that’s what I think Jim was trying to say,” she said.
US Senate set to ban deals with Russian arms exporter over Syria
The US Senate has approved a measure to prohibit the Pentagon from purchasing from Russia’s main arms exporter Rosoboronexport. The US’s stance that the company is supplying Syria with weapons was the reason for its decision.
Yet the amendment clearly states that the ban can be overturned if “the Secretary of Defense determines that such a waiver is in the national security interests of the United States with respect to the capacity of the Afghan National Security Forces.”
In the past, the US has purchased helicopters from Rosoboronexport for the Afghan security forces, as part of a $367.5 million deal with the US signed in May 2011 for the delivery of 21 Mi-17s helicopters.
Rosoboronexport manages most of Russia’s weapons sales by cooperating with more than 60 countries and accounts for more than 90 per cent of annual arms sales.
Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said the project to purchase helicopters from Rosoboronexport has always been a positive one and Russia“does not wish to see this collaboration damaged as a result of ill-conceived decisions and a bad state of mind of US Senators.”
The amendment needs to be approved by the Congress. The entire National Defense Authorization Act will need to be signed by the US President Barack Obama, but he threatened to veto it for reasons unrelated to the Russian export firm, Foreign Policy reported.
US Senators argued that Russia has supplied more than $1 billion worth of arms to the Syrian government since the unrest in Syria began in March 2011.
Russia has maintained its stance that it only supplied weapons to Syria strictly based on the existing agreements and solely for defense purposes in an event of an attack from external forces.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov clarified Russia’s supply of arms to Syria back in July. He stated that Russia is complying with international law and is merely fulfilling previous contractual obligations with Syria related to air-defense systems signed in 2008.
“We are sending no battleships to Syria. We have been saying publicly that we have been implementing contracts under which we have to supply arms to Syria. Those armaments are entirely defensive and they mostly consist of air defense systems, which cannot be used against the population and can only be used to respond to outside aggression,” Lavrov told RT.
Russia supplies Syria "only with something that Syria would need in the event of an armed attack on it from outside," the minister added. "We don't supply Syria or anyone else with things that are used to fight against peaceful demonstrators, unlike the United States, which regularly supplies that region with such special equipment,” he said
The General Director Sergey Chemezov of Rosoboronexport confirmed that Russia will fully honor its obligations before Syria unless there are international sanctions imposed on Moscow by the UN.
“There are no sanctions whatsoever regarding Syria. If international sanctions are imposed by the UN Security Council, everything will change. And if there are no sanctions, why should we refuse to cooperate with this country? This is business after all,” Chemezov told Interfax.
Fulfilling all earlier signed contracts is a “litmus test” for other nations interested in purchasing Russian weapons that demonstrates that Russia is a stable and predictable partner, he added.
Previously, the US halted deals with Rosoboronexport from 2006 to 2010 because of concerns that the company was selling arms to Iran. The ban was lifted in 2010 after Russia backed UN’s Security Council sanctions on Iran.
Merkel reaffirms support for Israel after U.N. vote!
(Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel reassured Israel of her country's support on
Saturday, two days after Berlin disappointed the Jewish state by abstaining in a
U.N. vote on the Palestinians' status.
O MY GOODNESS! Why does it seem ALL people want to go to war!
North Korea plans second rocket launch in December
(Reuters) - North Korea is to carry out its second
rocket launch this year in December as South Korea holds its presidential
election in a move that will likely trigger diplomatic tensions between the two
Koreas and censure from the United States and Japan.
State news agency KCNA said on Saturday that the launch of a rocket carrying
a satellite would take place between December 10 and December 22.
North Korea says its
launches are for peaceful purposes, although Washington and Seoul believe the
isolated, impoverished state is testing long-range missile technology with the
aim of developing an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying a
nuclear warhead.
North Korea undertook a similar launch in April that was aborted a few
minutes into its mission. The North is banned from conducting missile or
nuclear-related activities under United Nations resolutions.
The coming launch will take place around the time of South Korea's
presidential polls on December 19 and close to the first anniversary of the
death of former leader Kim Jong-il.
Kim died on December 17 last year and was succeeded by his son, Kim
Jong-un.
(Reporting by David Chance and John Ruwitch; Editing by Ron Popeski)
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